Museum director sees brass cowbell 'woryang' as spiritual talisman for Korean Peninsula peace [Interview]

"Just as the 'woryang' once protected oxen, I hope this exhibition becomes a spiritual talisman guarding peace on the Korean Peninsula — and an opportunity to rediscover lost values in the things we have discarded."

Lee Young-hwa, director of Bium Museum, made the remarks in an interview ahead of the opening of the special exhibition "Peace on the Korean Peninsula — The Sound of Woryang" at Gyeongin Art Museum in Insadong, Seoul. She said peace must come first before the environment or material prosperity can have any meaning.

The exhibition was selected for the "2026 K-Museum Regional Tour Exhibition and Tour Support Project," organized by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korean Museum Association. It runs from June 10 through July 12 at Gyeongin Art Museum in Insadong, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Bium Museum is a private folk museum in Gwangju that opened in 2016. It holds approximately 30,000 Korean modern and contemporary lifestyle artifacts collected by Lee over more than 50 years, spanning the full cycle of life from birth culture to funeral customs. The exhibition draws from that collection to showcase folk items reflecting agrarian culture and the lives of ordinary people — including more than 100 woryang, some 50 peony embroidery pieces and folding screens, and around 100 everyday farming implements.

At the heart of the exhibition is the woryang — a brass bell once hung around an ox's neck. Farmers of the past crafted the bells from brass, a metal snakes are known to dislike, to protect their most prized possession. The sound of the bell and the scent of the brass as the ox moved were enough to drive snakes away without harming them, warding off danger while sparing other lives. It was, in essence, a talisman born of ancestral wisdom. The exhibition draws a connection between that traditional reverence for life and the cause of peace on the Korean Peninsula today.

"The most important value on the Korean Peninsula right now is not wealth or glory — it is peace," Lee said. "I organized this exhibition because, just as the woryang's wisdom protected the ox without harming other creatures, we need a spiritual talisman to protect peace on the Korean Peninsula."

The exhibition also invites reflection on the human decency and ecological values that have faded amid material prosperity. Long-used everyday artifacts, it argues, are not merely old objects but records carrying the values of their era and the ethics of their communities. The show also confronts the environmental destruction, community breakdown, and spiritual emptiness that deepened through rapid industrialization and the uncritical embrace of Western-centered material culture.

"In the agrarian age, even people who could not read taught their children the duties of being human, the awe of heaven, and the meaning of shame," Lee said. "Today, with everyone chasing success and material gain, we are surrounded by people who have lost all sense of shame."

Bium Museum's jogakbo — traditional patchwork cloths sewn from fabric scraps left over after making garments — will also be featured in the exhibition. Once purely utilitarian, the pieces have been reappraised as works of art after drawing wide praise from European artists. Last year, they were invited to a French book concert event introducing the culture of Gwangju, the hometown of novelist Han Kang, and were displayed there for two months. The episode speaks to the artistic depth and contemporary relevance hidden within the everyday heritage left by Korea's ancestors.

"European artists who visited Bium Museum for the Gwangju Biennale saw the jogakbo and said they were as artistic as Mondrian's paintings," Lee said. "I was struck by the fact that handicrafts made for a living could be reappraised as art today."

The exhibition will also present 49 works created in collaboration with Gwangju-based artists — an attempt to reinterpret traditional wisdom through the language of contemporary art, giving visitors the chance to experience folk artifacts and installation art side by side.

Going beyond a simple introduction of folk relics, the exhibition makes a sustained effort to trace the spiritual roots being lost in a material-driven society, seeking to restore the cultural continuity severed by industrialization and connect it to future generations.

"It is dispiriting to think that artifacts valued as works of art abroad are the very things we ourselves overlook," Lee said. "I hope the exhibition becomes a moment for us to ask what we have lost and what we have managed to keep."